


Like the Angels in Heaven

by Bunny_Manders



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blasphemy, I got everything about Catholicism wrong, I'm gonna get real Weird with it, M/M, Other, Spiritual Abuse, and not like cute humanoid angels either, angel fucking, so much blasphemy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 03:44:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20302927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bunny_Manders/pseuds/Bunny_Manders
Summary: At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.Brother Michael never set out to sin. He wanted more than anything to live a virtuous life, to honor God in all he did, and yet sin found him as fleas find a dog in summertime.The problem was that Abbot Lucas was so very good at finding sin. Under his watchful eye, a turn of events that Michael might have blamed on carelessness or poor fortune was always revealed to be caused by some greater moral corruption. If wine went sour in the barrel, it was because Michael had sinned in his thoughts as he trod the grapes. If a drought killed the herbs in the kitchen garden, it was because Michael had slept through morning prayers and insulted God with slothfulness. When Michael wrote his letters backward or puzzled over the verse he was meant to read, it was because the very Devil was at work within him, twisting God’s word into nonsense.





	Like the Angels in Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> This was a Good Omens AU that wandered so far away from home that I figured I wouldn't bother cluttering up the Good Omens tag with it. Lots of sex, very little plot, extremely half-assed research. No update schedule, I'll just upload new chapters when I feel like it.

Brother Michael never set out to sin. He wanted more than anything to live a virtuous life, to honor God in all he did, and yet sin found him as fleas find a dog in summertime.

The problem was that Abbot Lucas was so very good at finding sin. Under his watchful eye, a turn of events that Michael might have blamed on carelessness or poor fortune was always revealed to be caused by some greater moral corruption. If wine went sour in the barrel, it was because Michael had sinned in his thoughts as he trod the grapes. If a drought killed the herbs in the kitchen garden, it was because Michael had slept through morning prayers and insulted God with slothfulness. When Michael wrote his letters backward or puzzled over the verse he was meant to read, it was because the very Devil was at work within him, twisting God’s word into nonsense.

Brother Michael still had the duties of a novice, even though he had been at the monastery for nearly ten years. In the shadow of the cloisters he had grown from a gangling, awkward youth to a man, and still the holy order had failed to leave their mark on whatever crucial part of his soul needed saving. It wasn’t for any lack of trying on Michael’s part. He did the worst work without complaint. He prayed until his knees ached. He confessed every sin, no matter how small, but for each one he was absolved a dozen more sprung up in the fertile soil of his unsalvageable soul.

It was in the summer of the year Michael turned five and twenty that the stranger arrived. For the past two weeks an unusual heat had settled in. Trails of moisture ran down Michael’s back under his habit, and when he bent over a page, a bead of sweat dropped off his nose and turned the face of the Virgin Mary into a sodden mass. Illumination was usually the one activity Michael could manage without sin. He wasn’t supposed to be permitted to do it, but Brother Paul’s joints were getting stiff in his old age, so Abbot Lucas permitted Michael to work on the days Paul’s fingers wouldn’t bend around a brush.

The abbot was reading the text to be copied, and though the passage was about a great battle for the survival of the Israelites, in the abbot’s low drone it sounded about as interesting as an inventory list of the cellars. Michael looked around to made sure his brothers’ eyes were on their own pages. He blotted the Virgin’s face with the hem of his sleeve. The damage wasn’t so bad as he’d feared. Once the vellum dried, he could fix her eyes. Until then he’d work on her robe or the folds of Christ’s swaddling.

The door of the scriptorium opened. The iron hinge had developed a squeal that Michael intended to fix. Abbot Lucas looked up, nodded sharply, and dropped his gaze back to his page, all without breaking his recitation. Michael bent over his work and wondered who might dare to interrupt the abbot.

His back was to the door, but under the abbot’s drone he heard footsteps on the stone floor. Whoever had come in was pacing the rows of bent-backed monks, looking at each page in turn. Michael put his hand over the Virgin’s face, trying to make the gesture look natural, as if he’d only meant to steady the page while he worked on her robe.

The stranger stopped beside him,and stayed there for so long that he finished the lines of drapery. There was nothing left to do but move his hand. He lowered his head, to block the view that way. He’d smeared the blessed mother’s features even worse with his fingertip, so that her lips were bleeding into her neck and her eyebrows were escaping into the white of her veil.

He felt a pair of fingers under his chin, strong and unexpectly cool in spite of the heat. They lifted his head up, so he had no choice to move away from the page. He didn’t recognize the man beside him, which was extraordinary in its own right; the abbey was not a remote one, but Michael knew every brother and every villager in the towns nearby at least by face if not by name. The stranger was perhaps in his thirties or early forties, with a proud Roman nose and a face that was thin but not uncomely. He wore a monk’s habit, lighter by many shades than Michael’s own Benedictine black, but not pure white. His eyes were the same color as his robes, a pale raincloud grey. His hair was clipped short but not tonsured, and that too was going grey at the temples. 

While Michael studied his face, the stranger studied his page. He looked at the Virgin’s ruined face. His lips thinned and the corners of his mouth turned up. It was the same sort of smile that Abbot Lucas gave whenever he caught Michael in some new sin. He removed his fingers from Michael’s chin, turned away, and walked on to the next monk with his hands behind his back. Michael was left with the impression that he’d failed a test.

The stranger moved through the rows, stopping only briefly at the other brothers’ stations. He didn’t have to touch the others; none tried to hide their pages. Michael did the best he could to fix his illustration of Saint Mary, but she would always be looking at the story of her own Annunciation a little cock-eyed.

He saw the stranger again at dinner, eating in silence as they all did. He was at Vespers too, in a favored position near the front, very close to the abbot. When the service was over, the man looked over at him, and again he gave that little smile that made Michael’s stomach twist out of fear that there was some joke and he was the butt of it. Then the man bent his head to speak to the abbot, and the two left together, deep in conversation.

Michael spent half the night worrying about the stranger, and the other half plagued by dreams he would have to report at confession. It wasn’t fair, he thought, rising from another sinful fantasy with a familiar unsatisfied ache between his legs and an even more painful bitterness gnawing at his heart. He wanted to be like his brothers in the order, moving through God’s creation serenely, but he was always snagging on the rough edges of the world.

The stranger was still at the abbey in the morning. He smiled at Michael over breakfast, and Michael dropped the salt he was supposed to be passing in Brother Barnabas’s lap. He appeared again when Michael was weeding the kitchen garden, and Michael got so flustered he pulled up a healthy sage plant when he’d meant to uproot a dandelion. And then of course he was there while the monks copied the holy text, circling the room, but stopping the longest by Michael’s station. Brother Paul’s fingers still troubled him, so Michael had moved on to an illustration of King Herod and the Magi. He put all his concentration into making Herod’s face a terror, and realized only when he was finished that he’d replicated the abbot’s stern expression precisely. When he looked up he saw the stranger’s grey eyes flick to Abbot Lucas, then back to the page, and then he smirked in a way that made it clear the resemblance had not escaped him either.

So it went for nearly a full week. Michael found himself in possession of his own personal storm cloud, because wherever he went the monk in the grey habit was sure to turn up soon enough. They never had the opportunity to speak, even for introductions. The abbey was not a silent one, but Abbot Lucas found much virtue in cultivating an atmosphere free of chatter. They only existed near each other, the stranger smiling to himself, Michael growing increasingly more nervy and prone to accidents.

Sunday was bearing down on him, the day he dreaded most of all. The sabbath was a day for confession and repentance. Sundays were a reminder of Michael’s inherent sinfulness, of all the ways he had failed to measure up in the course of the week.

The routine had worn such a groove in him that as soon as he’d sat down in the confessional, he ran at once through the preliminary, “Bless me, Father,” and launched straight into his weekly list. There was the Virgin’s spoiled face, and the wasted salt, and a jar he’d smashed in the kitchen. He’d let a patient leave Brother Ezekiel’s infirmary without payment, because she had four children and an infirm father to feed and she wouldn’t be doing much work this summer on her broken ankle. Then, of course, there were the dreams. Some of the men Brother Michael dreamed about had faces he couldn’t remember on waking, but others were familiar to him: a lad from the village, his own brothers in the holy order, an icon of Saint Sebastian in the agony of martyrdom. He’d even dreamed once of the grey monk, smiling as always, with his fingers under Michael’s chin to tilt his head up for a kiss.

Abbot Lucas dished out the usual penance. Michael knelt to pray on the floor beside his narrow bed. In winter it was agony, but in this heat, it was not so bad to kneel on cold stone. He could recite his Act of Contrition without thinking about the words at all, letting his mind go blank as a freshly scraped sheet.  _ Fill me with something worth looking at, _ his own private prayer went, while his mouth formed holy words and his kneecaps ached.  _ Make me the canvas for art, or the page for sacred text, so long as you make me worth something. _

Long after his throat had gone dry and his legs had numbed under his own weight, Michael hauled himself off the floor and fell into bed. He must not have prayed right, must not have atoned fully, because the night was full of sin.


End file.
